Sentient computers: has HAL's time come?

Gina Smith is the high-tech correspondent for ABC News.

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 12, 1997

"I am a HAL 9000 Computer. I became operational at the HAL plant, in Urbana, Ill., on Jan. 12, 1997."

If fact imitated fiction, today would be HAL's birthday. The malicious computer trying to run the show in director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was so sentient it was disturbing. And sure, the whole idea seemed a wild fantasy at the time. But almost 30 years later, it still leaves us wondering: Just how much of a fantasy is it?

So inspired, I spent the last week trying to figure out just how off the mark Kubrick and novelist Arthur C. Clarke really were. Is the idea of sentient, self-conscious computer - one that can think and plan for itself without total and constant human intervention - even a realistic one? Is it one scientists think is eventually doable?

If so, who's doing what and how far is anyone getting?

Latest business videos

First stop: Cambridge, Mass., home of a robot called Cog. Vaguely human-looking, it's flailing its "arms" around in a lab near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its dad is Dr. Rodney Brooks, who's at least as proud as most fathers. "Cog really is a "baby,' " Brooks explains. "I would say that in human years, it's about the equivalent of a 1-month-old even though we've been working on it for three years."

Brooks' approach to creating an artificially intelligent machine is, in many experts' eyes, an unorthodox one. The idea, he says, is to simulate the way human babies learn - through the senses of sight, sound and touch.

"We're trying to make it learn about the world through the same development cycle," he says. "During the first three months of life, babies learn an awful lot. So Cog right now is learning some very basic things about the difference between itself and the world. Like (a 1-month-old) it's at the point where it moves its arm because it sees a motion, but it doesn't know if it's knocked over a glass. That might come in a few months."

Cog's eyes are cameras, its ears microphones, and, indeed, its two arms will reach out to any movement. Like a baby, it will clasp your hand when you touch it, but it doesn't seem to exactly know what's going on around it.

"Right now, it's really just concentrating on hand-eye coordination. We want it to be able to look toward sounds it hears. We're also working on making it understand human faces, how to pick out human faces from other things moving around," he says. Brooks also hopes it's only a matter of time before his "baby" starts using the accumulated information it gets from its "senses" to start making discoveries on its own.

The next stop: Austin, Texas. Here, in a parallel effort, Brooks' former professor Doug Lenat is working on a rival, completely different approach. Rather than trying to develop a sentient computer by creating one with artificial senses, Lenat is trying to teach his creation - a program called Cyc - logically.

That is, Lenat and his team have been feeding Cyc simple, factual statements over the last 10 years in the hopes of creating a computer with common sense and reasoning abilities.

"We're teaching it statements like "Tables are flat,' or "Liquids need to be in containers, or they flow around,' " says Lenat.

"These aren't technical things. They're things that are so fundamental that by the time you can talk, you've pretty much learned these things."

Cyc - short for encyclopedia - has already learned 2 million of these statements, Lenat says. He hopes it is only a matter of time before Cyc can reason and come up with its own facts from the ones the programmers have given it.

"Human common sense is enormous," he says. "All we're doing with Cyc is giving it the tools that will enable it to learn more - the same way that, if you have a young child, you don't teach it everything it's going to know in life. You teach it enough so it can go to school."

Both Lenat and Brooks, incidentally, think the other is taking the wrong approach. "The real criterion of intelligence," Lenat says about Brooks' work, "is not: "Does it have a body? Does it wander around in the real world?' Rather, if you ask it things, will it react in a way that a human would? I believe intelligence is in the mind, not the senses."

"You simply need senses to experience the world," responds Brooks about his rival Cog project. "They're trying to give the machines facts, just facts. We're trying to build intelligent machines by having them learn the facts by themselves."

Both scientists do agree on two things. One is that

"2001" had an enormous impact on their work. "I was 13 when I saw it," says Lenat. "It had a profound effect on me. To this day, many of us have some model of what the future of computing might be like by looking at HAL."

Says Brooks: "HAL has completely determined my life's path - I'm not being facetious. I was 15, and when I saw "2001,' it opened a whole new world for me."

The other point of agreement is that the fearful idea of a sentient computer decades or even centuries from now doesn't necessarily have to result in a malicious computer that, even though it wasn't programmed to do so, decides to kill or harm humans. Both scientists say that a value on human life is one of the first things they've taught their systems.

Of course, as we've seen with such innovations as the splitting of atoms, any technology can be used for good or evil. Whether sentient computers ever come to pass - and what philosophical and ethical questions they'll pose - remains the stuff of science fiction for now.

Gina Smith is the high-tech correspondent for ABC News. She also hosts "Cyberlife," a nightly show airing on the Discovery Channel, and "On Computers with Gina Smith," a nationally syndicated radio talk show that airs in San Francisco every Sunday on KPIX 95.7 FM from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Got a question or comment? Mail it to The Examiner Business Department, P.O. Box 7260, San Francisco, CA 94120, or e-mail it to heygina@aol.com.&lt;

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.